We date, I think, less casually, or less prolifically, particularly in our teens. The UK context is different from the US one. It was, essentially, this: that Christian guys hid behind God-excuses rather than taking dating seriously – or even try it at all. By signing up you agree to our terms of useįrom this grew a whole theory I had, born from years of experience and intense observation, about Christian Bloke Syndrome, which would also have been the title of my book if self-publishing had existed back then. Thank you for signing up! Keep an eye on your inbox.

We Brits are, as a culture, a little skeptical of what we see as extremes. Back then, in those pre-social media days, trends took longer to make it over the Pond than they do now, though I’m not sure that those things would have ever become widespread in the UK. He had almost certainly absorbed the cultural phenomenon that grew up around the book in the US – purity rings, the almost fanatical embrace of true love waits. I mention he was American because it occurred to me the other day that perhaps he had, in fact, read I Kissed Dating Goodbye.

Let’s call him Dan, since that was his name, and there are a million Dans, and the chances of his reading this are, at best, minimal. I had also been hurt by a nice American Christian boy at university. I’d been deeply hurt at university by a guy whose dating philosophy, if you can dignify it with that label, was the opposite of Josh Harris’. I’d already had my teenage fun, my first snog and many subsequent ones. Not least because I wasn’t 13, or 15, or 17. The notion that you waited until you were ready to commit to a relationship that had the potential to lead to marriage, and then you pursued it in an intentional, chaste way, was a deeply appealing one. I was, at the time, unaware of most of American culture, save what I saw on Friends, and thus ignorant of the context into which it was written and the impact the book had already had in the US, where it had been out for some years. In my mid twenties, when I was living in London and desperate for a boyfriend, I picked up a book called I Kissed Dating Goodbye, by Joshua Harris.

I kissed dating goodbye documentary